Without professionalism in amateur sport, modern coaching techniques and serious young athletes to develop, Australia is facing at least two decades in the sporting wilderness.

These will be dark days for those of us, like me, who have taken great joy for many years in living our lives vicariously through Australian athletes.

The rest of the world has caught up and they are about to leave us behind.

This should not be a shock. While the Australian sporting industry and the Australian media have spent 30 years cheer-leading the sunburnt country, there should have been at least the odd dissenting or skeptical voice (apart from mine) suggesting the current situation was all-but unavoidable.

It is cold logic that once a country moneys up for a sport and becomes successful, others follow. Population and raw dollars almost guarantee that Australia would be passed when other countries committed resources to sport with the same zeal as Australia. Tennis is the prevalent example, but Olympic sports and cricket are all set to confront improved competition.

Aussie Rules is certainly an influence but Australian sports need to emulate, rather than fear, the AFL. (I also agree with Gideon Haigh.) Yet, even Aussie Rules would not be a world power for long if countries like the USA became major players.

Australia has advantages in sports like surfing, swimming and even golf, but Australia has no God-given right to be No.1 at anything. Everything eventually finds its own level.

The editor of the Manningham Leader read the AGB last week, emailed me, and asked if he could use my picture for a story he was doing on a local prankster, so I sent him a couple of snaps. He did not tell me the story was going to be on the front page! But nor did he tell me he would fail to attribute my photo.

GERMANY'S Nazi government was so angry about a dog trained to imitate Hitler that it started an obsessive campaign against its Finnish owner, according to newly discovered documents.

The dog, Jackie, was a mutt owned by Tor Borg, a businessman from the Finnish city of Tampere. Borg's wife Josefine, a German citizen known for her anti-Nazi sentiments, dubbed the dog Hitler because of the strange way it raised its paw high in the air like Germans greeting the Fuehrer with a cry of "Heil Hitler!"